Well, we understand that some users have concerns about this licensing mechanism. However company may also have other concerns about the licensing. So we are sorry that currently we may not change our mechanism. But as always, we'll consider all your suggestions and thoughts and try to improve it if possible.

InquiringMind wrote:If Romex went bankrupt, the chances of them removing activation are virtually nil

In case that we have to close our office (though we don't think it will happen ), we of course will update the mechansim for our clients. It is easy and have been implemented. All change work will be done at our side and don't need the actions from customers. So you totally don't need to worry about it.

support wrote:In case that we have to close our office (though we don't think it will happen ), we of course will update the mechansim for our clients. It is easy and have been implemented. All change work will be done at our side and don't need the actions from customers. So you totally don't need to worry about it.

To quote from the Shamus Young article linked to previously:

3. We’ll document all of that so it won’t be a problem. Really. We’ll put up a patch.

Put it up? Where? You’ve been bought up or are going out of business. You’ve come in on Friday morning to find you’ve been pink-slipped and the servers are going down.

Maybe you’re lucky and you got to keep your job and you’re now employed by the company that just bought your former employer. Do you have FTP access to their servers? Can you even imagine having the audacity to call them up and ask for some server space so you can put up a patch for a game that nobody remembers and which stopped making money nine years ago? Hey, you’re one of the lucky ones who got to keep his job. Don’t push it.

4. Really, I’ll do it. If I don’t have a server, I’ll put the thing on a Torrent and the community can handle it.

Legal is going to want to talk to you first. This is intellectual property owned by your employer, and you are not authorized to go around putting out new versions of it. Your new boss is going to want to know if this is going to generate a bunch of support traffic. (That is, cost them money.) How are you going to perform QA on this thing? Maybe they want to re-bundle the game into some sort of “classics collection”, and don’t want you releasing “new versions” in the meantime.

This is assuming you were bought out. If you went out of business, then the games belong to your creditors, and there is no force in the universe that could make them care about a promise you made in the forums a decade ago. They are trying to recover the large sums of money owed to them, and will be more than happy to drag you (personally) into court if it looks like you’re doing something that interferes with that process.

You most certainly will not be releasing a patch if you get bought out or put under. At least, I wouldn’t put money on it. Which is what you’re asking me to do when you try to sell me your game."

Now having downloaded the Primo trial (nice work on the UI by the way), I notice that the activation screen does include a username/keyfile option. Assuming the username is a customer name, then this would be an acceptable form of registration in my view since customers would only need to keep a copy of the keyfile safe.

The question then is how can a purchaser opt for this type of activation?

InquiringMind wrote:To quote from the Shamus Young article linked to previously:

Well, we would say that this won't happen. As we said before, the mechanism has already been implemented in current product. So we are able to transfer the work smoothly in case that we have to do that.

InquiringMind wrote:The question then is how can a purchaser opt for this type of activation?

This licensing type is usually used for volume/bulk users. A certain amount of licenses are required. And ususally an agreement will be reached.

support wrote:Well, we understand that some users have concerns about this licensing mechanism...

Actually no - some users are posting concerns here about your licensing. The vast majority who see this as a problem aren't going to bother registering to say so, they'll just wander on and find a more responsive vendor (the number of views this thread is getting may provide a hint).

Want an example? Spiderweb software used a similar system for their downloads (the CD-ROM versions of their software were DRM free) and as Jeff Vogel has stated, dropping it ("We stuck by this system for fifteen years. Might as well have just made a big pile of money and set it on fire. At least we would have gotten the warmth.") and going DRM-free resulted in the highest sales they've ever had.

support wrote:This licensing type is usually used for volume/bulk users. A certain amount of licenses are required. And ususally an agreement will be reached.

And what would you define as "bulk"? I could stretch to getting 3 or 4 licenses if that resulted in a DRM-free version using that system. However I'm not paying any price for software I can't rely on to work in future - and that means no online or offline activation.